[Jason Scott] gets a job in a candy factory — kinda

Remember when you used to have to dial into a Bulletin Board System to connect with others through computers? How about those fond memories of phone phreaking? If you find that the details are fading in your mind you’ll be happy to know that [Jason Scott] is making sure they’ll never be forgotten. And now he’s landed a new job that will make this mission even easier.

We’re most familiar with [Jason’s] film, BBS: The Documentary. This five-hour epic traverses the oft-forgotten world of the BBS. It pays attention to things like the formation of ASCII art groups, the elite control of the Sysop before the Internet decentralized access to information, and quirky technological limitations like what happened as FIDOnet ran out of addresses for new nodes.

In short, [Jason Scott] is a technological historian. He gives speeches, makes movies, and finds information stashes that history shouldn’t forget. He’s done this outside the tradition of finding a Professorship or Curator position for a major institution. Instead he asked for sabbatical funding through Kickstart, and now he’s found his way to a position that seems like it’s made just for him; Archivist for the Internet Archive. Go get ’em [Jason].

I hope there is some mention of what Valve did to announce Portal 2. I felt like a boss when I was decoding the pictures to get that phone number. That was the last time I ever heard of BBS being used on a moderately large scale.

That is so funny. I ran a BBS back in the day that eventually became a “chain” of BBS’es that was pretty popular locally. It is funny to see something like this hit the mainstream. Before this post, I had not heard of any of the above projects so I am surely going to download and watch. Maybe I will find a way to offer some input somewhere. The Archive maybe?